A regressive, authoritarian ideology is cannibalising public life.
My book, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World, is my attempt to grapple with this disturbing new reality. A new paperback edition has been published this week, and I had hoped that by this point, it would already have started to seem out of date. In truth, the problems I describe in the book are accelerating.Novels by Roald Dahl, PG Wodehouse and Agatha Christie have since been rewritten by ‘sensitivity readers’ (newspeak for ‘censors’). The Irish government is currently passing new hate-speech laws that are similarly draconian to those passed by the Scottish government in 2021. Prestigious scientific journals are publishing pseudoscience in order to uphold this new ideology, too. Only this week the Scientific American ran a piece entitled ‘Here’s why human sex is not binary’, illustrated with an image of the male and female gametes that prove that it is.
It’s difficult to keep up with these baffling developments. Most of us have noticed the rise of this new ideology that is now dominant in all of our major cultural, educational, political and corporate institutions. We can see that its impact is divisive, regressive and illiberal, and yet it describes itself using progressive-sounding terminology, such as ‘social justice’, ‘anti-racism’ and ‘equity’.
When language becomes unmoored from meaning, we are all at risk of mistaking change for progress.
We have seen that the disciples of this new religion are pushing for more and more censorship, whether that be through the cancellation of comedians, the deletion of potentially offensive scenes in old television shows, or stronger ‘hate speech’ laws. We have seen women physically assaulted for standing up for their sex-based rights. We have seen how anyone who questions the new orthodoxies jeopardises their career prospects and risks being publicly shamed. The existence of what we now call ‘cancel culture’ is often denied by those who indulge in it the most, but its list of casualties expands by the day.
Those of us who are taking a stand against these cultural revolutionaries are often told that we should just ignore them. Who cares if a few zealots are demanding that we attend ‘unconscious bias’ training sessions? Who cares if civil servants and teachers and staff at the BBC are being encouraged to announce their pronouns in emails and at the beginning of meetings? Who cares if the Ministry of Defence is holding LGBTQIA+ coffee mornings to discuss pansexuality? If we let them get on with it, the logic goes, all of this will just go away.
But this is very wrong. If we ignore these developments, the culture warriors won’t fade away – they’ll win.
These activists are promoting an authoritarian creed, and are doing untold damage to our world, while believing they are making it better. If your toddler starts smashing up the crockery, you don’t just politely wait for it to finish. Sometimes you have to intervene in order to prevent further damage.
Enel, Italy’s largest energy utility is in the news with conflict over appointing a new CEO because aspirations differ between ESG investors and the Italian government. There are headlines like these:
Norway’s oil fund rejects Rome’s candidate for Enel chair, Financial Times
Wanted! Investors demand Italy hire renewable expert, global networker to run Enel, Zawya
Government board nominations for Enel run into opposition, msn
MILAN (Reuters) – Italy’s biggest utility, Enel, confirmed its full-year guidance and entered a press blackout period ahead of a May 10 shareholder vote on a challenged board shake-up.
The group, whose main shareholder is Italy’s Treasury with nearly a 24%-stake, is at the centre of a governance row that will be decided at the AGM scheduled for next Wednesday.
The Treasury has proposed a new management, putting forward a slate of six new candidates and ousting current Enel CEO Francesco Starace, who has been at the helm since 2014.
Hedge fund Covalis, which holds around 1% in Enel, presented an alternative list of nominees, criticising the process under which the government picked its candidates. Covalis said the system that led to the government’s nominations “undermines investor confidence, erodes value and is out of line with international standards of best practice in shareholder democracy”.[Would those best practices be ESG?]
Proxy adviser Frontis Governance has urged shareholders to back the candidates promoted by Covalis and reject names put forward by the Treasury, in a report tailored for Switzerland’s Ethos, a group of pension funds and other investors.
On the financial side, Enel’s ordinary earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) in the first quarter rose 22% to 5.5 billion euros above an analyst consensus of 5.4 billion euros. Net debt at the end of March was 58.9 billion euros, down from 60.1 billion euros at the end of last year.
Starace described the results in the first three months of 2023 as outstanding and said the group had already exceeded halfof its 21 billion euro ($23 billion) asset sale target unveiled last November.
The state-controlled group intends to focus its business on the core markets of Italy, Spain, the United States, Brazil, Chile and Colombia.
Expertise in renewables and an international focus are what investors want to see from a new head of state-controlled Enel, as Italy’s government screens candidates to replace the energy group’s long-serving chief executive.
Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s administration is determined to oust current CEO Francesco Starace, several sources told Reuters. In charge since 2014, Starace is in the crosshairs of Meloni’s inner circle as he is deemed too independent.
Meloni’s office is also concerned about the group’s debt pile. But sources familiar with the matter said that head hunters hired by the Treasury are finding it tricky to put forward potential successors with the broad range of skills required to run one of Europe’s largest utilities.
With almost 60 Gigawatt of installed capacity, Enel is one
of the world’s biggest players in renewable energy
Starace won plaudits for his commitment to green energy. However, investors and the government grew restless over a debt pile that had grown to around 60 billion euros ($65.40 billion) in 2022 from 45.5 billion in 2020, when Starace was reappointed for a third term.
The company, which has been hit by soaring gas prices and government measures capping bills to shield consumers, saw net profit slip to 5.4 billion euros last year, from 5.6 billion euros in 2021.
The new CEO should not sacrifice the group’s exposure to North America and confirm its dividend policy, a number of investors said.
“People in Italy may prefer that Enel focuses on making things as much as possible in its home country and not investing so much abroad, but the company has no choice… if it wants to attract foreign investors,” said Vincent McEntegart, multi-asset investment manager at Aegon Asset Management, an Enel shareholder with assets under management worth $311 billion.
For Enel, U.S. President Joe Biden’s green energy subsidy package could mean double digit returns in North America compared with single digit in Europe, McEntegart said, adding such returns would underpin the group’s attractive dividend policy.
Since Starace was appointed CEO in May 2014, Enel has increased its
installed renewable energy capacity to 59 GW from 36 GW at the end of 2013.
Starace’s mantra has been electrification of consumption and digitalisation of grids and he said last year he wanted to leverage a renewed focus on energy security around the world to accelerate the group’s exit from natural gas. The group currently plans to become carbon free in 2040.
“My priorities for the new CEO would be to continue to roll out renewables and accelerate the exit from gas,” Simone Siliani, the director for Italy’s Fondazione Finanza Etica, told Reuters. Finanza Etica, which is an active investor on ESG issues, has been holding a tiny stake in Enel since 2008.
“Enel can make the difference if Italy wants to meet its decarbonisation goals,” added Siliani.
Summary:
Once again we have climatist financiers using ESG to push zero carbon against the mission of providing secure and affordable energy that citizens need.
At Rainbow Oaks Restaurant — just an hour outside of San Diego — a TikTok user shared that she had faced the most “dangerous” situation she had ever been in. At noon, while she was eating her stack of pancakes, about a dozen people stood up for the Star-Spangled Banner being played on the bar’s TVs.
As first reported by Fox News, the TikTok user who goes by the screen name @Paulinaappa_0 recorded the patriotic display and included the caption: “By far the most dangerous situation I’ve ever been in #godblessamerica #getout #illegal #whitepeoplethings.”
Rainbow Oaks Restaurant in Fallbrook CA plays the National Anthem daily at noon
Understand, this isn't about declaring loyalty to the government or military. It is about showing love to a certain culture and community, one we are losing every day. pic.twitter.com/AUf4aMCvNa
The Tik Tok video racked up 3.1 million views and over 19,000 comments with the vast majority affirming Paulina’s feelings of fear and disgust.
For the past six years, the restaurant has played the National Anthem every day at noon, according to the restaurant’s Facebook page.
Patriotism has suffered a steep decline in the last couple of decades. A March 2023 survey conducted by the Wall Street Journal found that 38 percent of respondents said patriotism was “very important” to them. When this same question was asked in 1998, 70 percent of people said it was “very important,” the newspaper reported.
This phobia towards the National Anthem or the American flag
is not a new phenomenon.
Two years ago, the New York Post reported that a California school teacher, Kristin Pitzen, removed the American flag from her classroom and put the LGBTQ pride flag in its place. Echoing the same cry of Paulina and her thousands of commenters, Pitzen said the American flag made her feel “uncomfortable.”
As for Hollywood actor and evangelist Kirk Cameron, neither the American flag nor the National Anthem strike fear into his eyes but rather hope in his heart. A viral video from February, shows Cameron leading a room full of children and parents in the National Anthem at a public library in Savannah, Georgia, in February. Cameron is on a 14-city book tour to combat the “wokeness” being pushed on children.
“We don’t want this woke garbage,” Cameron said in an interview with the Daily Signal. “It leads to brokenness and bondage and leads to misery. What we want is what our country was built on, which was the Bible and faith and family and love for country.”
The foundation upon which the case for so-called “common good capitalism” rests is rickety at best. As I explained in my previous column, the empirical claims used to justify this ill-defined version of capitalism range from questionable to downright false, while much of the economic reasoning deployed by “common good capitalists” is a nest of confusion. These flaws alone are enough to fully discredit the case for “common good capitalism.”
Yet “common good capitalism” is marred by an even deeper problem: it rejects the liberalism from which true capitalism springs, the absence of which makes impossible the operation of a dynamic market order that maximizes the prospects of individuals to achieve as many as possible of their goals.
“Common good capitalists” have in mind an economic system profoundly different from that which is championed today by liberal scholars. What each “common good capitalist” wants is an economic system engineered to serve his or her preferred set of concrete ends. Gone would be the liberal freedom of individuals to choose and pursue their own ends. Under “common good capitalism,” everyone would be conscripted to produce and consume in ways meant to promote only the ends favored by “common good capitalists.”
Note the irony. The economic system that, say, Oren Cass claims to advocate as a means of promoting the common good is, in reality, a means of promoting only the good as conceived by Oren Cass (which, for him, consists largely of an economy with more manufacturing jobs and a smaller financial sector). The hubris here is undeniable. “Common good capitalists” not only presume to have divined which concrete ends are best to guide the actions of hundreds of millions of individuals, nearly all of whom are strangers to them, but also are so confident in their divinations that they advocate pursuing these with the use of force.
The liberal doesn’t object to attempts to persuade others to adopt different and, hopefully, better ends. By all peaceful means, do your best to persuade me to embrace, as the lodestar for my choice of concrete ends, Catholic Social Teaching, economic nationalism, Marxism, veganism, or whatever other teaching or -ism you believe best defines the common good. But do not presume that your sincere embrace of a specific system of concrete values provides sufficient warrant for you to compel me and others to behave as if we share your particular values.
To the extent that the state intrudes into market processes in order to redirect
these toward the achievement of particular ends, it replaces market
competition and cooperation with command-economy dirigisme.
Income earners are not allowed to use the fruits of their creativity and efforts as they choose. Instead, consumption ‘decisions’ will be directed by government officials. The result will be a reallocation of resources achieved through the use, mostly, of tariffs and subsidies. And by so redirecting consumption expenditures, the pattern of production will obviously also be changed from what would prevail in a free market. (In fact, the specific goal of most “common good capitalists” seems to be the achievement of a particular manner of production — for example, more factory jobs — than would arise with markets left free.)
The capitalist economy, by its very nature, is not and cannot be
a tool for achieving particular concrete outcomes.
The capitalist economy, instead, is the name that we give to that ongoing, ever-evolving, organic order of production and exchange that arises spontaneously whenever individuals are free to pursue diverse peaceful ends of their own choosing and to do so in whatever peaceful ways they think best. That the results serve the common good is clear, if by “common good” we mean the highest possible chance of as many individuals as possible to achieve as many as possible of their own individually chosen goals. But let the state attempt to constrain and contort economic activity in the pursuit of a particular set of “common” concrete ends that everyone is compelled to serve, and capitalism disappears. It is replaced by what is more accurately called “[fill in the blank]’s-particular-notion-of-the-good statism,” with the blank filled by the name of whichever “common good capitalist” happens currently to be in power.
A Case In Point: Murphy’s Law Applies to Electric Cars and Trucks
If electric vehicles are so wonderful, why are consumers and businesses being forced to buy them?
The US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) new emissions standards for vehicles, released earlier this month, require manufacturers to increase overall fuel efficiency by over 25% by 2026,effectively mandating that EV’s make up two thirds of car sales. The EPA claims this will provide a total of over $1 trillion in benefits by 2055, reduce crude oil imports by 20 billion barrels, and reduce CO2 emissions by 10 billion tons.
What’s not to like? Just about everything.
Ruinous Economic Impacts
Let’s start with the economic impacts, which will be ruinous. First, the price of EVs will increase; that’s basic economics. The new rules will require that about two-thirds of the vehicles manufacturers sell are EVs. Given that most consumers do not purchase EVs, the best way to do that is to raise prices on internal combustion (ICE) vehicles until they are more costly than EVs. (Today, the reverse is true, with the average EV costing around $65,000, while the average ICE vehicle costs around $48,000.) Increasing provides an umbrella under which EV prices can be raised, too. So, if a consumer or business wants to purchase a new vehicle, they effectively will be forced to buy a more costly EV.
Battery Demand Over the Top
Second, increasing the demand for EVs will increase the demand for the materials to manufacture batteries, which are the single largest cost of an EV.Prices for rare earths, for example, have increased between 60% and 400% since 2020. Prices for lithium, the basic ingredient in most EV batteries, have increased by about 400%. Moreover, the US continues to prevent development of new mines to supply those materials. Instead, China has a stranglehold on them, and lax environmental rules to boot.
Electric Power Mostly Carbon
Then there is the electricity needed to charge those EVs, along with the charging stations in homes, apartment buildings, and on highways. Claims that this electricity will actually reduce emissions are based on huge predicted increases in wind and solar energy development. Yet, the US Energy Information Administration projects that, by 2050, wind and solar will provide only about 40% of electricity supplies. Consequently, much of the electricity needed to charge those millions of EVs will be provided by natural gas and even coal.
So, while the EPA may limit tailpipe emissions,
it will transfer many of those emissions to power plants.
Inflated Electricity Bills
Electricity costs will also increase, negating the anticipated savings from “refuelling” those EVs. That’s why the federal government has provided subsidies for wind and solar energy development for 45 years and why so many statesimplemented green energy mandates: developers of wind and solar could not, and still cannot, compete on price alone, despite proponents’ claims.
No Measurable Impact on Climate
But let’s suppose those hurdles magically are overcome. The environmental justification for the EPA rule is nonetheless absurd. The claimed reductions in CO2 emissions will have no measurable impact on world climate. Reducing CO2 emissions by 10 billion tons between 2027 and 2055 sounds like a lot. But world CO2 emissions were 34 billion metric tons in 2021 alone. So, over 28 years, the EPA’s proposed rule will reduce CO2 emissions by the equivalent of about four months of world CO2 emissions. And world emissions continue to increase because developing nations, especially China and India, have no intentions to restrict their economies.
Why Impose EVs?
The basic economic impacts, along with the negligible climate benefits, raise a simple question: why is the Biden Administration pursuing this EV windmill-tilting exercise? By effectively forcing consumers and businesses to purchase vehicles they do not want, the Administration will impose yet more damage on American’s standard of living, reducing mobility and raise costs.
That can’t possibly be their goal, right?
If only arm-twisting were prohibited beyond the ring.
John Tamny makes the case that authoritarian government is a poor substitute for free people managing themselves facing a public health threat. He writes at Real Clear Markets Dear Washington Post Editorial Board, the Experts Were the Crisis In 2020. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
The quote from Tolstoy’s War and Peace is a useful way to begin addressing the Washington Post editorial board’s confident assertion that “’A collective national incompetence in government’” was at the root of the U.S.’s alleged failure vis-à-vis the coronavirus in 2020. According to the Post quoting from a recently released report (“Lessons from the Covid War”), “The United States started out ‘with more capabilities than any other country in the world,’ but “it ended up with 1 million dead.” Were he still around, one guesses Tolstoy would mock the conceit of the Post’s editorialists.
That’s the case because “the thing that matters most to any man” is “the saving of his own skin.” That this needs to even be said speaks to how wrongheaded the Post’s editorial board’s approach to the virus was, and still is. It implies we have dead because government didn’t act properly, as though free people eager to live were unequal to a virus that the right kind of collective governmental action was more than equal to. Ok, but what was government going to do? Better yet, what if the virus had struck in 2015 when Barack Obama was still in the White House. What would he have done? Would he have instructed a virus that was spreading faster than the flu to take a “time out”?
The simple truth missed by the Post is that as humans
we’re wired to preserve ourselves.
On the matter of life and the presumption of death, government is excess. Whatever solution Obama might have come up with, or whatever Donald Trump did come up with, or (try not to laugh) whatever Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer would have done if the virus had revealed itself in 2021 would have been vastly unequal to the solutions crafted by free people.
Deep down the Post’s editorialists must know the above is true. Indeed, it’s not that the Soviet Union lacked experts, or that Cuba lacks experts now. The problem was and is that the remarkable knowledge of very few very smart people will never measure up to the collective knowledge of the citizenry. That’s why communism failed so impressively in the Soviet Union, and it’s why it fails in Cuba. Translated for those who need it, the people are the market and markets work. As I make plain in my 2021 book When Politicians Panicked, the problem was experts and politicians substituting their limited knowledge for that of the people. That was the crisis. Not so, according to the Post and the report they cite.
Supposedly the “leaders of the United States could not apply their country’s vast assets effectively enough” such that “1 million died.” Wrong. Over and over again. To see why, imagine if 10 million Americans had died in March of 2020. Can the Post editorial board think of what government might have done that would have somehow improved on a feverish individual desire to survive against long odds? The simple truth glossed over by the Post is that the more threatening a virus is (and the Post seems to view what most didn’t know they were infected with as wildly threatening), the more superfluous government action is.
Really, who reading this ever needs to be forced to avoid behavior that might result in sickness, or even death? And if the reply to this question is that some people DO need to be forced, you’re making the best case of all for unfettered freedom. Think about it. Those who reject expert opinion are the most crucial “control group” as a virus spreads. By going against the grain, we learn from their freely arrived at actions if the virus is as lethal as presumed, or not, how it spreads, how to perhaps avoid its spread, and all manner of other important bits of information suppressed by one-size-fits-all national solutions.
It cannot be stressed enough that free people crucially produce information. Instead of allowing them to produce it in abundance in 2020, the response arrived at by Democrats and Republicans was to lock people in their homes, thus blinding a nation “with more capabilities than any other country” to the best approaches to a spreading virus. Please keep all of this in mind with the report’s assertion that the “most important and fundamental misjudgment” about the virus was how it spread. You think? Of course, the muscular assertion ignores yet again that if knowing how a virus spreads is of utmost importance, the only credible answer is freedom.
Consider the latter in light of the statement of the obvious that all advances in medicine have always been born of matching doctors and scientists with the abundant fruits of wealth creation. In 2020, rather than encourage the very wealth creation that has long been the biggest foe of death and disease (by far), panicky politicians quite literally chose economic contraction as a virus mitigation strategy. Historians will marvel at the abject stupidity of the U.S. political class, but not the Post’s editorialists or the authors of a report that the editorialists remarkably find insightful.
Rather than acknowledge the obvious about government and experts as the crisis, the Post editorialists and the experts they kneel before bemoaned a national abdication of “wartime responsibilities.” One gets the feeling Tolstoy would chuckle yet again. In his words, “The course of a battle is affected by an infinite number of freely operating forces (there being no greater freedom of operation than on a battlefield, where life and death are at stake), and this course can never be known in advance; nor does it ever correspond with the direction of any one particular force.”
In short, on matters of life and death government control
is wretched, crisis-inducing excess.
The ‘sustainability’ regime is impoverishing the world.
In recent years, the overused word ‘sustainability’ has fostered a narrative in which human needs and aspirations have taken a back seat to the green austerity of Net Zero and ‘degrowth’. The ruling classes of a fading West are determined to save the planet by immiserating their fellow citizens. Their agenda is expected to cost the world $6 trillion per year for the next 30 years.
Meanwhile, they will get to harvest massive green subsidies
and live like Renaissance potentates.
In Enemies of Progress, author Austin Williams suggests that ‘the mantra of sustainability’ starts with the assumption that humanity is ‘the biggest problem of the planet’, rather than the ‘creators of a better future’. Indeed, many climate scientists and green activists see having fewer people on the planet as a key priority. Their programme calls not only for fewer people and fewer families, but also for lower consumption among the masses. They expect us to live in ever smaller dwelling units, to have less mobility, and to endure more costly home heating and air-conditioning. These priorities are reflected in a regulatory bureaucracy that, if it does not claim justification from God, acts as the right hand of Gaia and of sanctified science.
The question we need to ask is: sustainability for whom?
US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen recently suggested that her department sees climate change as ‘the greatest economic opportunity of our time’. To be sure, there is lots of gold in green for the same Wall Street investors, tech oligarchs and inheritors who fund the campaigns of climate activists. They increasingly control the media, too. The Rockefellers, heirs to the Standard Oil fortune, and other ultra-wealthy greens are currently funding climate reporters at organs like the Associated Press and National Public Radio.
Under the new sustainability regime, the ultra-rich profit, but the rest of us not so much. The most egregious example may be the forced take-up of electric vehicles (EVs), which has already helped to make Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, the world’s second-richest man. Although improvements are being made to low-emissions vehicles, consumers are essentially being frogmarched into adopting a technology that has clear technical problems, remains far more expensive than the internal-combustion engine and depends primarily on an electric grid already on the brink of blackouts. Green activists, it turns out, do not expect EVs to replace the cars of hoi polloi. No, ordinary people will be dragooned to use public transport, or to walk or bike to get around. [BMW will come to mean “Bike, Metro, and Walking.”]
The shift to electric cars is certainly no win for the West’s working and middle classes. But it is an enormous boon to China, which enjoys a huge lead in the production of batteries and rare-earth elements needed to make EVs, and which also figure prominently in wind turbines and solar panels. China’s BYD, which is backed by Warren Buffett, has emerged as the world’s top EV manufacturer, with big export ambitions. Meanwhile, American EV firms struggle with production and supply-chain issues, in part due to green resistance to domestic mining for rare-earth minerals. Even Tesla expects much of its future growth to come from its Chinese factories.
Building cars from primarily Chinese components will have consequences for autoworkers across the West. Germany was once a car-manufacturing giant, but it is expected to lose an estimated 400,000 car-factory jobs by 2030. According to McKinsey, the US’s manufacturing workforce could be cut by up to 30 per cent. After all, when the key components are made elsewhere, far less labour is needed from US and European workers. It’s no surprise that some European politicians, worried about a popular backlash, have moved to slow down the EV juggernaut.
This dynamic is found across the entire sustainability agenda. The soaring energy costs in the West have helped China expand its market share in manufactured exports to roughly equal that of the US, Germany and Japan combined. American manufacturing has dropped recently to its lowest point since the pandemic. The West’s crusade against carbon emissions makes it likely that jobs, ‘green’ or otherwise, will move to China, which already emits more greenhouse gases than the rest of the high-income world.
Meanwhile, the Chinese leadership is looking to adapt to changes in the climate, instead of undermining economic growth chasing implausible Net Zero targets.
There are clear class implications here. California’s regulators recently admitted that the state’s strict climate laws aid the affluent, but hurt the poor. These laws also have a disproportionate impact on ethnic-minority citizens, creating what attorney Jennifer Hernandez has labelled the ‘green Jim Crow’. As China’s increasingly sophisticated tech and industrial growth is being joyously funded by US venture capitalists and Wall Street, living standards among the Western middle class are in decline. Europe has endured a decade of stagnation, while Americans’ life expectancy has recently fallen for the first time in peacetime. Deutsche Bank’s Eric Heymann suggests that the only way to achieve Net Zero emissions by 2050 is by squelching all future growth, which could have catastrophic effects on working-class and middle-class living standards.
Rather than the upward mobility most have come to expect, much of the West’s workforce now faces the prospect of either living on the dole or working at low wages. Today, nearly half of all American workers receive low wages and the future looks worse. Almost two-thirds of all new jobs in recent months were in low-paying service industries. This is also true in Britain. Over recent decades, many jobs that might have once supported whole families have disappeared. According to one UK account, self-employment and gig work do not provide sustenance for anything like a comfortable lifestyle. Rates of poverty and food shortages are already on the rise.
As a result, most parents in the US and elsewhere doubt their children
will do better than their generation,
while trust in our institutions is at historic lows.
The fabulists at places like the New York Times have convinced themselves that climate change is the biggest threat to prosperity. But many ordinary folk are far more worried about the immediate effects of climate policy than the prospect of an overheated planet in the medium or long term. This opposition to the Net Zero agenda was first expressed by the gilet jaunes movement in France in 2018, whose weekly protests were initially sparked by green taxes. This has been followed by protests by Dutch and other European farmers in recent years, who are angry at restrictions on fertilisers that will cut their yields. The pushback has sparked the rise of populism in a host of countries, notably Italy, Sweden and France. Even in ultra-with-it Berlin, a referendum on tighter-emissions targets recently failed to win over enough voters.
This is class warfare obscured by green rhetoric.
It pits elites in finance, tech and the nonprofit world against
a more numerous, but less connected, group of ordinary citizens.
Many of these folk make their living from producing food and basic necessities, or from hauling these things around. Factory workers, truck drivers and farmers, all slated for massive green regulatory onslaughts, see sustainability very differently than the urban corporate elites and their woke employees. As the French gilets jaunes protesters put it bluntly: ‘The elites worry about the end of the world. We worry about the end of the month.’
This disconnect also exists in the United States, according to long-time Democratic analyst Ruy Teixeira. Attempts to wipe out fossil fuels may thrill people in San Francisco, but are regarded very differently in Bakersfield, the centre of the California oil industry, and in Texas, where as many as a million generally good-paying jobs could be lost. Overall, according to a Chamber of Commerce report, a full national ban on fracking, widely supported by greens, would cost 14 million jobs – far more than the eight million jobs lost in the Great Recession of 2007-09.
No surprise then that blue-collar workers are not so enthusiastic
about the green agenda.
Just one per cent, according to a new Monmouth poll, consider climate as their main concern. A new Gallup poll shows that just two per cent of working-class respondents say they currently own an electric vehicle and a mere nine per cent say they are ‘seriously considering’ purchasing one.
These Western concerns are nothing compared to how the sustainability agenda could impact the developing world. Developing countries are home to roughly 3.5 billion people with no reliable access to electricity. They are far more vulnerable to high energy and food prices than we are. For places like Sub-Saharan Africa, green admonitions against new agricultural technologies, fossil fuels and nuclear power undermine any hope of creating desperately needed new wealth and jobs. It’s no wonder that these countries increasingly ignore the West and are looking to China instead, which is helping the developing world to build new fossil-fuel plants, as well as hydroelectric and nuclear facilities. All of this is anathema to many Western greens.
To make matters worse, the EU is already considering carbon taxes on imports,
which could cut the developing world off from what remains of global markets.
More critical still could be the impact of the sustainability mantra on food production, particularly for Sub-Saharan Africa, which will be home to most of the world’s population growth over the next three decades, according to United Nations projections. These countries need more food production, either domestically or from rich countries like the US, the Netherlands, Canada, Australia and France. And they are acutely aware of what happened when Sri Lanka adopted the sustainability agenda. This led to the breakdown of Sri Lanka’s agricultural sector and, eventually, to the violent overthrow of its government.
We need to rethink the sustainability agenda. Protecting the environment cannot come at the cost of jobs and growth. We should also assist developing countries in achieving a more prosperous future. This means financing workable technologies – gas, nuclear, hydro – that can provide the reliable energy so critical for economic development. It does no good to suggest a programme that will keep the poor impoverished.
Unless people’s concerns about the green agenda are addressed, they will almost certainly seek to disrupt the best-laid plans of our supposedly enlightened elites. In the end, as Protagoras said, human beings are still the ultimate ‘measure’ of what happens in the world – whether the cognoscenti like it or not.
BizNews interviewed veteran climate expert Dr Richard Lindzen, the pioneering atmospheric physicist and former emeritus professor of meteorology at MIT. He recounted events that occurred in the 1980s, which gave birth to the all-consuming climate change narrative that prevails today. Having begun his research on climate change in the mid-70s, motivated by a sincere interest in understanding the Earth’s climate regimes, Lindzen offers a remarkably sensible assessment of the various elements parading as scientific evidence of an impending climate catastrophe. Particularly revealing from his recollection of events is how complicit the media and politicians have been in forcing the disastrous climate change narrative upon an unsuspecting and trusting public from the very beginning.
This recent interview by Richard Lindzen provides a brief and compelling overview sorting out facts and fictions regarding global warming/climate change. For those who prefer reading, below is a lightly edited transcript from the closed captions in italics with my bolds and added images. BN is Biz News and RL is Richard Lindzen.
BN: Joining me is one of the world’s leading voices on climate change, atmospheric physicist Dr Richard Lindzen. Dr lindsden I really appreciate your time; you’ve been an expert on climate change for over four decades now having started your research in the mid 70s. Briefly walk me through your career and what it was about climate change that captured your attention.
RL: It’s a peculiar question. I mean, do you think things only become interesting once they’re political? With the general circulation of the atmosphere, you want to know why you have the current climate. You have dozens of regimes throughout the Earth, so when you speak about the climate of the earth what the hell are you talking about?
South Africa is a very different climate from New England. The Pacific has many climate regimes, and you have the monsoon regimes in India. So there are a lot of things to understand. And it had nothing to do with the environmentalism; it was to understand how nature is on carbon dioxide and the greenhouse effect.
BN: You’ve claimed that believing that increased carbon dioxide is the largest driver of climate change is akin to believing in magic. What evidence supports this argument and what are the actual effects of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?
RL: Well, you’re asking a complex question. Carbon dioxide is a relatively minor greenhouse gas. But the question arises when you speak about what controls climate, and you’re speaking about dozens of different climate regimes.
Saying there is one knob that controls the whole works makes no sense,
and that is belief in magic.
But you know greenhouse effect is useful for one climatic index namely: Why is the Earth different from Venus or Mars or Mercury? Those are huge differences. They depend on basically the mean radiative picture; which includes the greenhouse, the distance from the Sun, the amount of radiation you get and so on. So within a given planet, in particular the Earth our primary concern, we refer to the differences in climate that like the Ice Ages and the very warm period 50 million years ago. These are really pretty tiny compared to the differences between the planets. And those “tiny” differences that we obsess on for good reason are not due to the greenhouse effect.
They’re due to the transport of heat between the tropics and the high latitudes.
And they are part of the Dynamics of the system
which depends on a number of factors
So primarily, what what does carry the heat? Well the ocean carries some heat but in many respects the most important thing is the so-called highs and lows. If you look at a weather map, it’s a little bit different in the southern hemisphere, but here you have the highs and lows going from west to east carrying weather. When you have the wind blowing from the north it’s cold, from South it’s warm. And this oscillates and gives work to your weathermen. In any event those same things carry heat to the pole. And many things determine them, but mainly it’s the differential heating between the tropics and the pole.
ERBE measurements of radiative imbalance.
So you have a system which has these features, and all of a sudden you obsess on the greenhouse effect. You end up having people saying really stupid things. So we’ve increased the temperature one degree or 1.1 in the last 100 years 120 years 150 years. And it’s been accompanied by the greatest improvement in human welfare in the history of the Earth, while some claim one-half degree more will be curtains. Only a politician could come up with something quite that absurd. But on the other hand when you get to the U.N and other things. it’s politicians that run it. And they’ve enabled this hysteria, frightening children their lives are going to be finished in short order. The UN IPCC has a working group that deals with science (Working Group 1). Even there in a thousand pages they don’t speak about an existential threat.
So you have other reports from the U.N that are not scientific that say: Oh yes it’s coming to the end of the world. And politicians say, well this is what we have to go by. I don’t know what you do, but it’s an evil movement, and it’s causing immense damage. It is trying to condemn people in Africa in the developing world to perpetual poverty. And yet I have to ask: Why would this be a goal? I don’t know.
BN: One of the cornerstones of this, let’s call it an agenda, is the constant bombardment to the public of reports on the rise of extreme weather events is this are these reports patently false or are they due to climate change?
RL: Well, you’re pointing to something very important. Even if it were occurring how do you relate it to this one number? But it’s not even true. Again going back to the IPCC, in the UN report they say there is virtually no evidence of a relationship between extreme events and climate change. Now they say that, but that doesn’t fit the politics, so they say something else. If you know of the American comic of years ago, Groucho Marx; he said, “I have my principles. If you don’t like them I have others.”
BN: That’s actually a good description on the politicization of climate change and the significant human progress enabled by the fossil fuel industry. Under this politicization, what do you think the end goal could possibly be for the manipulation of data given by the IPCC and the dismissal of data that contradicts it?
RL: Well, the energy sector is vital, it is the harnessing of fossil fuels that has led to the massive development of the western world. You know the progress since the invention of the steam engine has been the major feature in world history. On the other hand, because it’s such a large sector there are opportunities to make fortunes, even if your only activity is destroying the system. So for example in the U.S our current budget is showing trillions of dollars for climate change. Whether or not you think it makes sense doesn’t matter; somebody’s going to get those trillions of dollars and they have a real interest.
BN: I presume that the predominant funding would go to Renewables; pretty much anything that’s not nuclear or fossil fuel.
RL: What about the tools that extract energy from this, they’re not renewable. |They involve slave labor and that sounds pretty good doesn’t it. Now you have material usage, you have destruction of Landscapes. It’s almost as though the environmental movement has decided to commit suicide and go all in for things that destroy the environment. What you’re doing with the solar pedals and windmills and so on, you’re killing birds you’re destroying the environment. These have lifetimes of 10, 20 years, and you don’t know how to dispose of them. So this has nothing to do with the environment, it’s a power play.
BN: I had an interview with Professor William Harper and he said that the climate change activism movement is a joke and comparable to a coalition or organized crime unit of religious fanatics. And you’ve expressed the same sentiment. To what extent do you think that this is a result of people having pure intentions, but not being properly informed, not just trying to spin the situation far away from what the actual reality is.
RL: It’s hard to assess motivations. You’re certainly taking the public and making them feel that getting rid of carbon dioxide, they’re doing something virtuous. As I’ve occasionally pointed out let’s imagine somebody came up with a good device that could get rid of about 60, 70 percent of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. What would be the result? The result would be: we’d all be dead. That’s a very peculiar pollutant. One that we can’t live without.
Though I think it’s based a lot on ignorance. You have economists talking about tipping points, and the geologists know that through most of the Earth’s history we’ve had far greater amounts of CO2. There’s never been any evidence of a Tipping Point. This is a very implausible thing but it sounds scary. It’s pretty clear going back on the history of the issue, when it got started in the early 80s, that it was already a governmental aim. You had these meetings at Villach, Austria and Bellagio, and there would be people interested in climate attending these, usually about a hundred. Those from the government were all in favor of this, while the others were scratching their heads and asking what’s this about. Somewhere along the way, somebody must have decided this is the way to go and they started pushing for it. Global cooling wasn’t panning out.
I think from the beginning of Earth Day, it was obvious you wanted to control the energy sector. At first it was sort of amateurish, you know acid rain, global cooling. Then someone realized, no matter how clean you made energy it would still produce CO2. So let’s go after that–you’ll never get rid of CO2 without getting rid of fossil fuels. There’s no evidence whatever that this is well-intentioned.
BN: But we still have a measured consensus of between 90 and 100 per cent of climate scientists that agree that it’s anthropogenic climate change. How is this the standing reality?
RL: Look, in 1988 when Jim Hansen first testified before the U.S Senate, Newsweek ran a cover issue showing the Earth on fire with the claim underneath, all scientists agree. No scientists were asked. This is the way you convince the public, which is pretty illiterate when it comes to science. I don’t think the public feels comfortable about that, which is often ignored. So you immediately assure them: the scientists all agree, you don’t have to worry about it. And they knew that whether the scientists agree or not.
BN: Dr John Christie said that it’s actually a completely falsified number.
RL: Oh yeah as the record shows, there was a reduction from 1988 saying all scientists Agree. Now it was only 97%. It’s a fake number, it’s just designed to tell people they don’t have to understand the science, just go along
BN: But then my question is if it is in fact such a small percentage of scientists that don’t agree . . .
RL: But we have to ask what they agreed to. You can frame the issue so that it was a hundred percent, for instance if you asked whether increasing CO2 increases or decreases temperature. Well I should say it probably increases it slightly. And then that’s listed as agreeing that the end of the world is coming if we increase CO2. They’re two different questions.
BN: So why do you think more climate scientists haven’t actually been vocal about the complete inaccuracy of these consensus figures?
RL: it’s a good question. One of the things that has changed is perfectly obvious. This was a small area in the 1980s. When you had a meeting, if you got a hundred people that was pretty substantial. And very few of them thought there was anything significant going on that would be called existential. So what happened? If you look at funding in the U.S for climate science between 1989 and 1996 when Clinton/Gore Administration came in, funding increased by about a factor of 15. You literally created a whole new field, and you knew that the people who were brought in, knew that the reason for the funding was this issue. Indeed if you didn’t go along with it you lost your funding, So you know my funding ended as soon as I went public with my position.
BN: One of the common criticisms against you, your credibility and your views on climate science, is that you have ties to the fossil fuel industry. Is this true?
RL: No. Remember that everyone in this following that 15-fold increase came in it for the money.They assume anyone opposed must have gotten money from someone else. At MIT ExxonMobil does support some work, only on the part of people who support the alarm. The funniest was when they attacked me for writing an article in 1991 for Cato’s regulation magazine. And their argument was 10 years prior to that, Cato had received 10% of its funding from ExxonMobil. Now for this article I was paid 200 dollars, so presumably two dollars of that was from ExxonMobil 10 years prior to convince me to change my view.
BN: I just try to balance the scales, to get two sides of the story. I had an interview with Professor Guy McPherson, and he says with a very deep conviction that we are in the midst of abrupt climate change and that the methane released predominantly by the Arctic ocean will be the end of humanity by 2026. What’s your take on this?
RL: Well, he’s entitled to any science fiction he wishes to produce, but there’s no scientific evidence of that.
I think once people realize that the public is amenable
to scare stories, they get carried away
BN: What in your view is the political, economic and environmental implications of this move towards net zero and an abandonment of the fossil fuel industry?
RL: Pure malice. . . Plus profits for a few. Quite obviously you have people like Gore and Kerry and so on making hundreds of millions of dollars flying around the world ignoring all the things that they would prohibit Ordinary People. I suppose for these people it’s a return to feudalism where where us peasants should know our place and they should have their privilege.
BN: In 2001 you proposed the iris hypothesis on climate change. What was the premise of this?
RL: Well that was a question in some respects I think less important now. But since they were making a big fuss over changes of one degree, two degrees, so the question is why CO2 doesn’t do much. And it turns out that they had assumed assumed feedbacks that instead of trying to preserve a situation would act to make whatever we do worse. And there were plenty of problems with these feedbacks they they were improperly implemented.
So with the cooperation of NASA at the time, we looked if there were any obvious things occurring that were negative feedbacks. And it did look as though essentially upper level clouds in the tropics were acting in such a manner as to oppose the greenhouse effect. That seemed like an important feedback and it’s one which I think still likely plays a very important role in an important phenomenon that was called the early faint Sun paradox.
I don’t know if you’ve ever heard about this, but the sun’s output is increasing with time. If you go back two and a half billion years, the solar output was appreciably less than it is today.Yet the evidence is the earth did not freeze over; the Earth maintained a temperature that was very similar to today. The question is: How could it do that with a 20, 30 percent reduction in radiation. And it turns out that this Iris feedback is entirely capable of balancing that change. And so I think that remains a fairly substantial argument for the system being stable.
BN: What are the epistemological issues around climate change research
RL: OK. You have to remember a couple of things: One this was a small field. Two it was concerned with the problem: Why do you have different climate regimes; things that dealt with the Here and Now. So when you increase the funding by a factor of 15 the talent wasn’t available. So new topics were introduced, and one of them was climate impacts. Now this had nothing to do with understanding the physics of climate. If you were working on cockroaches, and you said my grant is to study the role of climate on cockroaches you got funded.
So you have all these impacts: climate and obesity, climate and diabetes, and so on. They wanted a piece of the action and they all became “climate scientists.” It’s worth remembering for instance, in 1990 my department at MIT no one called themselves a climate scientist. There were good reasons for that: climate was a very comprehensive thing. I was working on Dynamic meteorology, colleagues were working on oceanography, there were Marine geochemists. None of us pretended to comprehensive knowledge of everything about climate.
But all of a sudden you have people who know nothing about the physics
who are climate scientists because they got a grant
to find out whether diabetes was related to climate.
BN: You say that climate variability is actually the thing that we should be looking at to understand what is changing our climate and not human activity. Can you summarize the difference between anthropogenic climate change and climate variability, and why it is that you believe it’s climate variability that we should be looking at and not human activity
RL: Oh I’m not saying you shouldn’t look at things. People should be free to look at what they want. But we do know that long before there were even people, climate was changing markedly. Even before the Industrial Revolution there was alittle ice age. It had all sorts of documents, for instance villages in the Alps saying the ice is overtaking our village. You had the ice ages every hundred thousand years in which you had massive glaciation.
And you know this had nothing to do with people,
so you would need to understand those differences.
There was progress with the ice ages. A man called Milankovitch noticed that ice ages bore a relationship to orbital variations. It took a while but there were there was a climate program trying to find out how this worked. And we have a pretty good idea at this point of why that worked and Milankovitch was pretty much right. He said it would depend very much on the solar radiation in summer at high latitudes. And that was a well-known feature of glaciology: whether a glacier grows or not doesn’t depend so much on winter which are always cold in the northern hemisphere. But in summer if the snow that accumulated in Winter melts, you don’t build a glacier.
If the summer is cool and the glacier snow doesn’t fully melt,
then you build up each year.
You have thousands of years to build up your glacier.
Well you know it turns out for instance that CO2 follows temperature in the ice ages and it changes enough to change the flux about a watt per square meter. On the other hand when you look at the Milankovitch parameter, the incoming solar radiation over the course of this Ice Age cycle varies on the order of a hundred watts per square meter. That’s much more significant.
But then you have people say: “Well yeah I know that since CO2 is following that you can’t say CO2 caused it. But it must be CO2 amplification that was important.” But I mean it makes no sense: one watt versus a hundred.
BN: When I spoke to Dr Judith Curry, her story was just a very unfortunate reflection of what happened to dissenting voices. And she said that she’s essentially unhirable and so she had to leave for the private sector. What have you had to face as a result of going against the grain and the consensus for so many decades?
RL: Well you know Judith at first was a strong supporter of global warming and attacking anyone who questioned it. It’s interesting that she changed. I don’t know what to say. There are a couple of things that happened. First of all I’m older, so I had a senior position. I was doing research in a lot of areas and the National Science Foundation was funding my research in fluid mechanics. That continued a while so I sort of did climb on the side. The department of energy at first tried to fund people on all sides subjectively, but by the 90s they were told to quit that. And so the research manager there did me a favor. I had not fully expended my funding and she let me keep it past the due date without adding anything to it so that allowed things to continue a bit longer.
With publication again I was well known in the field and so I published some papers in the American Meteorological society’s monthly Bulletin and they got through. They were reviewed but the editors were all fired immediately after publication. And the paper was never rejected but I immediately invited people to criticize it. When the criticisms were published, we were not permitted to answer for six months, which was very unusual.
BN: That’s the manipulation of the justice system. How the situation is rigged to support the narrative and the complicity of politicians and scientists.
RL: Yes the situation was rigged, it was very much a March through the institutions. And that’s a problem for professional societies. Whether you are a member of the American physical Society or American Meteorological Society, or for that matter the American musicological society, you’re a member of a group of people who have a professional interest. And they elect a president and an executive manager to take care of the public relations so on
I think the people pushing this issue realized all you had to do is turn an official, the executive manager or something, and he ends up speaking for the whole group, never having actually sampled the people. And so you take over the American Meteorological Society, the National Academy, the American Academy, all of them are top-down organizations with managers. And they’ve done a terrific job of that
So you have some naive hypothesis that something as complex as climate is controlled by a single control knob of a minor gas that controls a couple of watts per meter squared out of hundreds. You can only promote this if you have a public, including political officials, who are totally illiterate or enumerate versus science.
You mentioned to all these people who are getting support. You find that scientists only have to say something like they think CO2 increasing will give some warming and they leave it to the politicians to say this means the end of the world is coming. And their backup position is: I never said that.
BN: Are there any anthropogenic elements that humans could increase or continue with, like fossil fuel consumption, that will possibly have catastrophic consequences?
RL: You know a nuclear war could do that but driving your SUV? I guess it appeals to certain people’s vanity that we are all powerful.
BN: Just to close off: What would you recommend as a way out of this situation that feels a little bit like a trap?
RL: It’s a very serious question. When you co-opt the institutional structure, then you have people like the world economic Forum, the EU full of bureaucrats who are just infatuated with the power they might have. It’s got to be very difficult to break out, either there are political parties that are opposed to this. One hopes maybe they’ll gain power and just trash this. Time will of course play a role but I hope we don’t have to wait to see the destruction of modern society and realize it had nothing to do with climate. I’d like to think we can get out of this before then.
BN: As it stands are we at risk or in any way getting close to a climate catastrophe?
RL: I suppose it depends on how you define it. If you define a catastrophe as having three inches of extra rain one year, then we’re all in their catastrophe. If you really mean an existential threat, the answer is: No, we’re nowhere near that. It just makes no sense. These are scare stories you especially want to give to kindergarten kids because they have no defense mechanism.
You know there may be some hope that the developing world, I mean clearly China, India, Russia are ignoring this. They know it’s nonsense so they’re sitting by and watching the West self-destruct while wondering about what divine good luck they have. You know they’re not going to do anything about it. If you’re really worried about CO2 you know we’ve spent trillions of dollars trying to reduce it and get to Net Zero. And you look at CO2 versus time and it continues to increase.without any change So we’ve had no impact upon that. So you’d ask yourself:
If we have no impact, and we’re worried about it,
why aren’t we building resilience?
Do we want to make ourselves more vulnerable
so we’ll be properly punished? That’s nuts.
BN: It does sound like you’re reading the message between the lines of the environmentalists.
RL: Yeah, it seems as though they hate Humanity, they want Power and they don’t give a damn about the environment. And they certainly give no attention to feeding starving people, when that is in fact a real problem.
Addendum:
In a previous publication Lindzen sets the record straight about the “March through Institutions” with names and maneuvers which have crippled efforts to answer questions about the functioning of earth’s climate system.
When an issue becomes a vital part of a political agenda, as is the case with climate, then the politically desired position becomes a goal rather than a consequence of scientific research. This paper deals with the origin of the cultural changes and with specific examples of the operation and interaction of these factors. In particular, we will show how political bodies act to control scientific institutions, how scientists adjust both data and even theory to accommodate politically correct positions, and how opposition to these positions is disposed of.
By taking a few minutes to read his text (link in red above), you can learn from Lindzen some important truths:
♦ How science was perverted from a successful mode of enquiry into a source of authority;
♦ What are the consequences when fear is perceived to be the basis for scientific support rather than from gratitude and the trust associated with it;
♦ How incentives are skewed in favor of perpetuating problems rather than solving them;
♦ Why simulation and large programs replaced theory and observation as the basis of scientific investigation;
♦ How specific institutions and scientific societies were infiltrated and overtaken by political activists;
♦ Specific examples where data and analyses have been manipulated to achieve desired conclusions;
♦ Specific cases of concealing such truths as may call into question global warming alarmism;
♦ Examples of the remarkable process of “discreditation” by which attack papers are quickly solicited and published against an undesirable finding;
♦ Cases of Global Warming Revisionism, by which skeptical positions of prominent people are altered after they are dead;
♦ Dangers to societies and populations from governments, NGOs and corporations exploiting climate change.
Summary: Thanks to Richard Lindzen and others for putting on the record how broken is the field of climate science. It is dangerous in itself, and it also extends into other domains, threatening the scientific basis of modern civilization. Fixing such scientific perversions will be difficult and lengthy, but it can only start with acknowledging how bad it is. It truly is worse than we thought.
The top rice producers are in Asia The world’s top rice producer is China, at 214 million metric tons. India, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Vietnam are next. In Africa, Nigeria (6.8 million) is the largest producer. Brazil (11.8 million) and the United States (10.2 million) are also top producers, according to 2018 data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.
But Now This Warning
VIDEO: Rice is to blame for around 10 percent of global emissions of methane, a gas that over two decades, traps about 80 times as much heat as carbon dioxide. Scientists say that if the world wants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, rice cannot be ignored. pic.twitter.com/46GgkaGPgK
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates around 770 million tonnes of rice were produced in 2018, with China and India responsible for approximately half of that amount.
Flooding isn’t strictly necessary for rice to grow – it’s an efficient way of preventing the spread of invasive weeds. It’s so fundamental to how many rice farmers operate that it’s not easy to imagine it being grown any other way…
Microbes that feed off decaying plant matter in these fields produce the greenhouse gas methane. And because rice is grown so prolifically, the amount being created is not to be sniffed at – around 12% of global annual emissions.
This crisis is as bogus as the rest of the asbsurdities Schwab conjures up.
Dr. William Happer at C-Fact explains the issue with methane gas.
“Methane, the molecule CH4, is the main constituent of natural gas. Animals like cattle and sheep belch methane as they chew their cud. They are able to get more energy from forage by digesting some of the cellulose with the aid of methane-generating microorganisms in their stomachs. Termites use the same trick to digest wood. Microorganisms in soils, notably rice paddies, also emit large amounts of methane.”
“Few realize that large increases in the concentrations of greenhouse gases cause very small changes in the heat balance of the atmosphere. Doubling the concentration of methane – a 100% increase, which would take about 200 years at the current growth rates – would reduce the heat flow to space by only 0.3%, leading to an average global temperature change of only 0.2 °C. This is less than one-quarter of the change in temperature observed over the past 150 years.
“Most of the predicted catastrophic warming from greenhouse gas emissions is due to positive feedbacks that are highly speculative, at best. In accordance with Le Chatelier’s principle, most feedbacks of natural systems are negative, not positive.
It wouldn’t do much!
“So, even if regulations on U.S. methane emissions could completely stop the increase of atmospheric methane (they can’t), they would likely only lower the average global temperature in the year 2222 by about 0.2 °C, a completely trivial amount given that humans have adapted to a much larger change over the past century while reducing climate deaths by over 98%. And U.S. regulations will have little influence on global emissions, where producers are unlikely to be as easily cowed.
“In fact, there is no climate emergency and there will not be one,
with or without new regulations on methane emissions.”
“However, you can bet that if the Biden administration is successful in promulgating regulations on oil and gas producers, it will expand these efforts into ranching and agriculture, which emit about the same amount of methane as energy production. No sector of the economy will remain untouched by the EPA’s long arm of climate regulations.“
The power sector is about to enter a “new era of falling fossil generation” as coal, oil and gas are pushed out of the grid by a record expansion of wind and solar power, according to new analysis by climate thinktank Ember.
Wind and solar power reached a record 12% of global electricity generation last year, according to Ember’s global electricity review 2023. This drove up the overall share of low-carbon electricity to almost 40% of total generation.
With even faster growth set to continue this year, Ember says 2022 is likely to mark a “turning point” when global fossil fuel electricity generation peaked and began to fall.
The thinktank forecasts that, by the end of 2023, more than 100% of the growth in electricity demand will be covered by low-carbon sources.
Experts broadly agree that global electricity generation needs to be completely decarbonised by 2040 if the world is to stay on track for its climate targets.
Our projected growth in associated natural gas production is mainly driven by three trends:
♦ Rising oil prices support increased production from unconventional oil formations with significant natural gas volumes.
♦ Many unconventional oil wells are aging, and as these wells age, they tend to produce a higher ratio of natural gas relative to oil.
♦ Associated natural gas resources are becoming more economical, driven in part by provisions in the IRA, which creates penalties for venting and flaring methane and encourages producers to capture more natural gas from oil formations.
We project that associated natural gas production will increase from 7.2 Tcf in 2025 to 8.8 Tcf in the United States by 2050 in the AEO2023 Reference case. In the AEO2023 High Oil Price case, associated natural gas production peaks at 13.6 Tcf in 2035, accounting for 30% of the total domestic natural gas supply. By contrast, in the AEO2023 Low Oil Price case, associated natural gas production falls to 4.2 Tcf by 2050.
Strong continuing international demand for petroleum and other liquids will sustain U.S. production above 2022 levels through 2050, according to most of the cases we examined in our Annual Energy Outlook 2023 (AEO2023). We project that the United States will continue to be an integral part of global oil markets and a significant source of supply in these cases, as increased exports of finished products support U.S. production.
In our AEO2023, we explore long-term energy trends in the United States and present an outlook for energy markets through 2050. We use different scenarios, or cases, to understand how varying assumptions about the future could affect energy trends. These cases include:
The Reference case, which serves as a baseline, or benchmark, case. It reflects laws and regulations adopted through mid-November 2022 but assumes no new laws or regulations in the future. It also assumes the Brent crude oil price reaches $101 per barrel (b) (in 2022 dollars) by 2050.
The High Oil and Gas Supply case, which assumes 50% more ultimate recovery per well for tight oil, tight gas, or shale gas in the United States compared with the Reference case. It also assumes 50% more undiscovered U.S. oil and natural gas resources and 50% more effective technological improvements than in the Reference case.
The Low Oil and Gas Supply case, which assumes 50% less ultimate recovery per well and undiscovered sources, and 50% more effective technological advancement than the Reference case.
The High Oil Price case, which assumes the price of Brent crude oil reaches $190/b (in 2022 dollars) by 2050.
The Low Oil Price case, which assumes the price of Brent crude oil reaches $51/b (in 2022 dollars) by 2050.
Although domestic consumption of petroleum and other liquids does not increase through 2040 across most cases, production of U.S. petroleum and other liquids remains high because of more exports of finished products. In the High Oil Price case, increased production leads to the most U.S. exports among all cases over the projection period at 9.13 million barrels per day (b/d) by 2050, more than double the 3.9 million b/d exported in 2022. The Low Oil Price case shows the opposite trend with the least 2050 export volumes of 407,000 b/d, nearly 90% less than 2022 exports.
Electric Power Outlook
The figure above illustrates the relationship between installed capacity (left panel) and electricity generation (right panel). Because wind, solar, and nuclear have the lowest operating costs, their electricity generation over time mirrors their trend in installed capacity: slightly declining for nuclear, and increasing for wind and solar. By contrast, natural gas and coal have higher operating costs, and so their generation can vary over time depending on demand levels and the relative operating cost of other technologies.
In our March Short-Term Energy Outlook, we forecast the wind share of the U.S. generation mix will increase from 11% last year to 12% this year. We forecast that the solar share will grow to 5% in 2023, up from 4% last year. The natural gas share of generation is forecast to remain unchanged from last year (39%); the coal share of generation is forecast to decline from 20% last year to 17% in 2023.
The electric power sector includes electric utilities and independent power producers. It does not include generators in the industrial, commercial, or residential sectors, such as rooftop solar panels installed on homes or businesses or some combined-heat-and-power systems.
Comment:
The statement above concerning capacity and operating costs is simplistic, and could be misleading. EIA actually has a more realistic method of comparing power sources. Example below:
EIA has developed a dual assessment of power plants using both Levelized Cost and Levelized Avoided Costs of Electricity power provision. The first metric estimates output costs from building and operating power plants, and the second estimates the value of the electricity to the grid.
Andrew Doyle writes at Spiked The New Puritans must be stopped. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images
As for Hollywood actor and evangelist Kirk Cameron, neither the American flag nor the National Anthem strike fear into his eyes but rather hope in his heart. A viral video from February, shows Cameron leading a room full of children and parents in the National Anthem at a public library in Savannah, Georgia, in February. Cameron is on a 14-city book tour to combat the “wokeness” being pushed on children.
First from the Zero Carbon zealots at Resilience 
Science Matters 